Barry Unsworth has a marvelous talent for depicting place and time. His most recent novel, After Hannibal manages to evoke the Italian countryside without falling prey to one of the greatest dangers of faced by books based on an author's experience living in a foreign country: overweening quaintness. We follow the exploits of a series of transplants to rural Umbria, a retired American couple looking to remodel their dream house, an Italian history professor abandoned by his beloved wife, a shady English "building expert", a gay couple with relationship trouble, a British land speculator and his wife embroiled in a dispute with their neighbors, and a German interpreter haunted by his father's role in a Nazi massacre of Italian civilians during World War II.

In this issue of Bold Type, you'll find an excerpt from After Hannibal, and an original essay reflecting on life in Umbria.